Monday, June 3, 2013

Transfuture Allstars - A Porn Review

In
this day and age, old notions of gender and sexuality are challenged
daily by individuals across the country. Every day I can get up and go
outside and walk a few blocks and bump into at least half a dozen
proponents of queer desire. I live with a drag queen, an embodiment of
an often unspoken acknowledgement that gender is a performance; if not
necessarily a refutation of that performance (opinions are divided).

It’s
a great time to live in and I and my blue fingernails and desire to be
objectified and pursued are quite happy about it as a whole. What does
this mean in the porn world, though? The queer has always been the
exotic, and thus erotic, and as such “tranny” and “shemale” porn has
been rampantly popular for at least the last two decades. Much of the
erotic desire in this particular branch of porn comes from the
unexpected and interesting juxtaposition of a penis being on a person
who behaves and is arrayed as female. Much in the same way that racial
porn works, the actual character or portrayal matters little. The
person’s sole erotic interest is in their unusual features.

However
this is only one branch of queered pornography, and one that appeals to
a certain set of western straight men primarily. What I’m about to
cover here takes an entirely different approach to the concept. Instead
of exoticizing queer desires, Radio’s artwork normalizes those desires
in a setting that emphasizes the consent and safety of all participants.
It’s transgressive in the best sort of way and should be interesting to
look at. I’m going to cover three of her short comix, which I believe
can all be found at Slipshine
for subscription money or elsewhere if you’re patient/determined.
Slipshine is a great outfit in the vein of topatoco, providing another
revenue source for the talented and interesting sort of people who
typically write or draw webcomics. It also has a notable bent towards a
progressive concept of sexuality, where it should be fun and appealing
to everyone rather than a narrow group of straight men. I have more to
say about the movement later.

Trigger Warning: Literally nothing. This stuff is cute as shit.

The
art in all of these comics is something of a cross between Erika Moen
and Meredith Gran. I want to point out the first hint that this is going
to be a somewhat different style of porn comic: the breast that is
visible sags in the proper way a breast should, and features much larger
areola than is typically featured in pornography. As you can guess by
the chain and collar, this is a bdsm comic. And away we go!

All
of radio’s comics on this website take place in what is essentially an
alternate world that mimics a lot of fantasy conventions, including the
typical conceit that men and women are in equal social standing. This
concept is common in both Japanese and western RPGs and their derivative
fantasy materials, but is often destroyed by common tropes about men
and women that establish something more like a “separate but equal”
hierarchy where women are the spellcasters and ranged weapons experts or
are in some way involved in indirect combat while men are the fighters
and defenders and paladins and generally involved in classes that
require direct strength. Gender is important to us as people, so we’re
not about to let it go unexpressed in anything we create.

The comic has established that these two characters have a
relationship and a previously sexual one. Given the construction of most
pornography as spontaneous sex outside of any pre-existing contact,
we’re already beyond the pale.

The
average uninvolved person’s concept of BDSM is pretty fucked, and not
surprisingly this is due to a great deal of social messaging that
emphasizes the deviance of BDSM and the inherent dangers of the power
play involved. The unfucked reality is that BDSM encompasses a wide
variety of activities and is often done with the full love and consent
of all participants. It’s a shared activity between equals who agree to
give over power to one another for whatever personal reason they may
have.

In
many ways the fucked concept of BDSM is created by the fucked concept
of heterosexuality as we commonly know it, with the man in charge of the
situation as the dominant party and the woman pliant and submissive.
Translating this dynamic into its extremes, however, means creating
situations where women are enslaved and men in full control of every
part of the individual, undoing centuries of social progress and doing
what we assume is reverting to what we assume is our previous
uncivilized state of brutality (Hobbes won; Locke stinks). It’s scary
stuff that springs from the scarier implications of automatic
heterosexuality, yet none of it is real. BDSM is play like board games
are play and video games are play and theatre is play.

That
we can leap to ugly assumptions about people based on the things they
pretend to be or do is a strong argument for the notion of
performativity.

This
is largely here for continuity’s sake. Most of the rest of these pages
are sex. Notice the continued motif of realistic boobs and large areola.
One of the weirder concepts of beauty created in the last 60 or so
years is the creation of the “perfect nipple,” rejecting the majority of
women, who have a wide variety of shapes and sizes of nipples and
areolae. Since women’s bodies are their most valuable possessions, this
sort of arbitrary limitation has created many many insecurity complexes.
Featuring even one or two deviant body shapes in pornography helps to
reinforce that all people are sexy and all people are different. There’s
no right way to be attractive.

As
I mentioned above, heterosexuality demands that men be the dominant
pursuers while women be the pursued objects. To use a frequently
employed /r9k/ virgin Nice Guy™ metaphor: women are the locks while men
are the keys. In this metaphor a good key is a key that opens a lot of
locks. A bad lock is a lock that is opened by a lot of keys. This
concept creates and sustains the idea of sexually forward women as sluts
or whores or inherently unclean and unworthy. Pornography on the whole
is very conservative, so the majority of women in pornography adhere to
this concept. They’re shy or demure or basically unwilling to fuck until
a certain amount of skill on the side of the man loosens them up.

Sexually
forward women in pornography are frequently marginalized as products of
abuse, debased monsters without shame or many other constructions that
serve to explain why a woman would deviate from the Nice Guy™ norm. In
Radio’s comics nearly all of the women are sexually explicit, frank
about their activities and desires and are not shamed or marginalized or
otherwise denigrated.

So
as you’ve probably figured out, the handcuffed woman from the last
sequence had a penis, just like this woman does. The people are very
explicitly women, with all the hairlessness and bone structure and fat
distribution that women would have. The only difference is in genitals.
In a lot of ways this is constructed as a transwoman ideal, to have very
obviously female body without having to surgically trade in
conventional sexual pleasure. These characters are not explicitly trans,
though. They’re just women with penises, the ultimate divorce of
genitals and gender. This means we’re operating in a context where some
women simply have penises and no one bats an eye at the matter.

Right
away we establish that this woman is an adventurer or possibly just a
collector of weapons, and she has fairly large breasts. As I mentioned
earlier it is uncommon for a woman in a fantasy setting to wield
close-range weaponry and doing so tends to reflect on the construction
of their personality.

The
gist of the story is that Hayley here covets that sword but can’t
afford it. She assumes that she is about to exchange sexual favors for
the sword but is instead put to work cleaning.

In
Radio’s comic universe, genders are socially equal and the traditional
notion of men as perpetually horny pursuers of women is destroyed. Sex
becomes a negotiation between two individuals of equal status instead of
a predator vs prey relationship. This provides the opportunity and
context for a character to believably misunderstand a sexual proposition
for a non-sexual one. The comedy of the panel is somewhat tragic, since
the joke relies on the incongruence between our reality where sexual
exploitation is common and rampant and this universe, where it’s
unexpected and surprising.

This
is about the moment that inspires homicidal rage in heterosexual men
who have otherwise been led to believe that the woman’s genitals were
what they expected. Encountering a penis transgresses a very important
part of hetero identity, that they find men repulsive and penises
repulsive as an element of men. Reaching the point of imminent sexual
activity with what they presume to be ciswomen and having their partner
revealed to be transwomen directly challenges that belief, since they
were attracted enough to get them to take their pants off in the first
place. The identity crisis ends up sort of deadly, since the identity is
so strongly ingrained into the character of men and masculinity and
femininity is so thoroughly devalued in culture that it becomes
basically enraging, and worse enraging with a nearby target for that
rage. Clearly it’s the “trap’s” fault for placing them in this
situation, for challenging their notion of what a woman is or means or
what they could be attracted to as a heterosexual male.

Here,
this situation is handled with a “well now…” It’s hard to express to
you how transgressive it is. There are some of you in the audience
reading and looking askance, since futanari and dickgirl porn is about
as common on the internet as rice is in china, but those are different
situations, typically handled in different ways. This approach is both
casual in presentation, but the sex presented isn’t particularly
fetishistic and there’s not the constant and overt displays of
femininity that sustain the concept of futanari. I’ll be talking more
about this as this project goes on.

So
if that isn’t enough, we’re presented with a male who is interested in
continuing and possibly establishing a deeper relationship. It’s
consistent with his previous nonpredatory behavior, but it’s still
emblematic of a divergent social script. Instead of the man here
disposing of his sexual interest at earliest possible convenience, it’s
the man who is more interested in continuing things than the woman.

This
last comic is mostly in black and white and I don’t have as much to say
about it. It proceeds like the last two, with a cute premise: one
character is a warrior who defeats a monster but is exhausted. The other
character is a woman who just happens to be bathing nearby. The spring
is a magic spring of rejuvenation, which naturally demands that the
healed take their clothes off.

Shoom!

And
then they start making out. It’s a weak premise, but hey man it’s porn
comix. Already Radio’s tend to spend more time in setup than others
usually do. Seven pages to fucking is pretty hefty in this genre,
especially in light of doujins that spend max 2 pages and each page with
fucking has all the dialogue squished into the margins. It’s an unusual
conceit, but comes from more of a webcomics approach than a straight
pornography approach to comix creation.

As
you might have noticed, this dude doesn’t have a dick. This lady does.
“Cuntboy” pornography is a particular branch of rarer pornography that
features just the opposite of “dickgirl” pornography and is most similar
to transmen in morphology. A man with a vagina is ultimately less
threatening and perpetually less interesting to talk about in society,
since we’re more interested in catering to heterosexual male interests
and needs. Since transmen are men who present as men, their existence is
not in any way dangerous to other men since they’re not expected to be
attractive to other men. The only men who would be surprised or
challenged by their existence would be gay men (who are indeed
frequently threatened by lesbians. It’s complicated.) who are already
breaking social norms to have this contact in the first place. In many
ways this is why both lesbians and transmen are completely marginalized
by social movements promoting social and sexual equality. Since neither
of them interact with nor threaten the ruling heterosexual male
hegemony, neither of them is considered particularly important or
interesting. This is why, for example, despite there being at least a
dozen gay male bars in the french quarter/marigny area of new orleans
alone, there are no lesbian bars in the entire city. This is why when
trans issues come up in the news, it’s issues of transmisogyny or
acceptance of transwomen identities and never transmale issues. Despite
recent efforts toward uniting Trans*under a single banner, this simple
and unavoidable reality that is frequently ignored by many ardent trans
movements that prevents a legitimized unity. This problem is similarly
reflected in LGBT organizations that frequently devolve into just G
organizations. (Or GL at best)

The rarity of transmen porn next to the commonality of transwoman porn is yet another reflection of this issue.

Radio
ends the comic with a cutesy message and a promise of more sex to
follow. Many of her comix are actually pretty formulaic. Cutesy fantasy
inspired setup, particular variety of queer sex followthrough, and a
punchline that presumes more inevitable sex. It’s a simple approach and
thoroughly sex-positive one. Radio’s characters like having sex with
each other and generally are happy about the experiences they have. Even
this simple thing is a rarity in pornography. Often pornographic works
will feature disdainful or resistant women being dominated by a man who
is uninterested in her particular sexual pleasure and after he gets off
the designated number of times, he’s appropriately no longer interested
in having anything to do with his used sexual object.

This
is why I appreciate Slipshine as a creation more than anything. The
founding concept behind it is the simple idea that sex is awesome and
everyone loves it and the site features a broad array of artists that
typically work in webcomickery displaying their artistic talents in
creating sex comix. Every single work on that page is upbeat and funny
and features characters doing sex because they want to and enjoying the
sex they’re doing. Contrast this with even last article’s depiction of
broken homes, crying sex partners, weird fucked up gender norms. It’s a
queer future and we’re all going to be better off living in it.